AtmanIsBrahman

When you come across a video with this title, you expect it to be somewhat profound. Unfortunately, Curt spends the entire video talking about conceptual abstractions attempting to define existence— which of course is impossible. He treats the subject as if it’s some kind of academic debate that we’ll eventually find the answer to, if only we refine our conceptual abstractions well enough. But Existence is first order, so it’s impossible. I recommend watching this video to see how the rationalist mind confuses itself. It’s honestly sad to see that this is the state of philosophy and science in the 21st century. This underscores the need for big picture thinking, openmindedness, nonconformity, etc. — basically what Leo teaches. Otherwise philosophy becomes a joke.

I guess the difference is understanding the functioning of the mechanics of the dream vs the dream that generates the mechanics. I'm sure Curt and other scientists genuinely care about figuring out the mechanics of the dream. It's kind of like being obsessed with a video game and learning all the strategies, lore, map, exploits, etc. The game is ultimately entertainment, but there isn't anything wrong with it per se. I find it problematic when scientists try to understand the dream that creates the mechanics and have no idea where to start, or insist on their mechanical explanations. It's like there's a different plane of thought they haven't unlocked.

It seems like much of the forum hasn't learned the lesson from Leo's Deconstructing Rationalism series. All I'm doing is applying the lesson. It's completely obvious what Curt and academics are doing wrong in terms of Philosophy once you understand it. The issue isn't even awakening or mystical experience, it's the way of thinking. Our 21st century culture essentially indoctrinates itself into being mentally stunted. Curt's way of thinking makes it impossible for him to understand reality unless he changes.

I was referring to the average person’s heaven with a family reunion and 72 virgins. Maybe this is how people interpret mystical teachings through their ego, or alternatively they could come from people’s partial realizations. I’m trying to figure out which one it is.

Then it wasn't full death. Hence "near" death experience. Do you think the idea of heaven/afterlife comes from people having these partial-death experiences, where the ego is still active to some extent?

I probably read about 50% of the book of not knowing. I read the entirety of this book. It is good, although dry writing like all Ralston books. It takes work to get something out of it. Some of the material you might already know if you’ve read Book of Not Knowing and watched Leo, but it’s important to use direct experience to test comprehension and not whether you’ve seen the concept before.

The latest blog posts have been very insightful. Ontological relativity collapses into oneness, all anchor points must dissolve, you have no substance therefore you are God. Beautiful stuff. It’s also cool to see that I actually understand some of this stuff now, whereas before they were mindfucks that may or may not be true.

I thought of another even more simplified model. It has four categories: 1) How the ego relates to itself 2) How the ego relates to other egos 3) How the ego relates to God/Reality/Truth 4) How the ego becomes God, i.e. relates to God as God These categories put self-help concepts and practices into an even more big-picture overview. For example, Understanding your personality, health, and life purpose fit best into (1), while socialization, looksmaxxing, getting money fit into (2), philosophy and rationality fall into (3) and establish the bridge into the only non-egoic category, (4)— merging with God. Of course all these distinctions are collapsible. They are just meant to give a new way of looking at self-help.

I decided to make a list of the sub-fields of self-help, inspired by Leo's old video from a few years ago. https://youtu.be/HJXthKsytpE?si=rpkTXIayk_0O__ky One criticism I have of Leo's list is that he often presented practices (such as shadow work) as fields, whereas I would consider them a practice that is an aspect of a field. I only listed what I consider to be fields. I also added some fields that Leo didn't mention. My list: 1) Life purpose- finding and creating your life purpose, and pursuing it as a career 2) Career- figuring out the thing you will spend a large portion of your time doing that will lead to getting money 3) Getting Money- finding out how money works, strategies to make money; learning investing and business; hustling 4) Mastery- mastering a skill, and learning the art of mastering a skill 5) Learning- finding out about various subjects and, importantly, the meta-skill of learning how to learn 6) Looksmaxxing- improving your physical appearance to get better social outcomes. Overlaps with health, biohacking, and social dynamics 7) Getting girls- Learning game; Online game, daygame, nightgame 8) Socialization- learning how to talk to people, make connections, enjoy socializing, be socially calibrated, influence people. Especially important for introverts. 9) Social Dynamics- understanding the social domain on a systemic level. Includes sociology and anthropology, politics, psychology and evolutionary psychology, blackpill/redpill, understanding conformity, and understanding collective ego. 10) Understanding your personality- figuring out the static aspects of who you are as an ego, and how to fit your life around them. Might include MBTI, Big 5, neurodivergence, etc. 11) Spirituality- the vast field of mystical and direct-experience approaches to reality. Can be used for being happier, eliminating suffering, chasing mystical states, psychedelics, the paranormal, contemplation, meditation, etc. 12) Philosophy- finding out what is true about the Universe/Existence/Life. Includes metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology. This overlaps with spirituality and makes use of but goes beyond rationality. 13) Rationality- learning to reason well and distinguish between truth and falsehood for worldly things. This includes scientific method, logic, argumentation, etc. It helps you to make better life decisions and ultimately do philosophy. 14) Health- living well and long. Includes nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress management (or avoidance), avoiding drugs. 15) Biohacking- using biological knowledge or pharmaceuticals to improve your life. This involves using rationality and science to figure out which chemicals might be worth using (of course be careful). Might include taking psychedelics, taking supplements, peptides, testosterone, etc. 16) Happiness- finding out how to be happy. Might involve all of the above areas. Of course, there is some overlap between many of these, but I think they sum of the landscape of self-help pretty well. What do you think? Is this a good summary of the self-help landscape? Or did I miss some fields? Leo's list, for reference: 1. Success, productivity and goal setting 2. Law of attraction 3. Time management 4. Career and life purpose 5. Creativity 6. Business and entrepreneurship 7. Marketing and sales 8. Leadership and management 9. Money management 10. Dating and attraction 11. Relationships 12. Love 13. Family and marriage 14. Sexuality, masculinity and femininity 15. Health, fitness, nutrition and alternative medicine 16. Body awareness and bioenergetics 17. Self esteem and confidence 18. Emotions and emotional mastery 19. Shadow work 20. Addiction recovery 21. Trauma recovery 22. Mental disorders 23. Personality types 24. NLP and (self-)hypnosis 25. Religion 26. Spirituality (and consciousness work) a. Non-duality b. Meditation/mindfulness c. Yoga d. Psychedelics e. New age/paranormal/psychic abilities 27. Shamanism and the occult 28. Healing 29. Psychology a. Positive psychology b. Transpersonal psychology 30. Lifestyle design 31. Technical "how-tos" 32. Politics and government 33. Philosophy, meta-physics and epistemology 34. Social psychology, cognitive psychology and anthropology 35. History and science 36. Biographies

I’ve been thinking about making this post for a while. I just want to alert you guys to the fact that looks are important for dating. Pickup is nice and all and does help, but our looks matter more realistically. If a very attractive guy does pickup, he will have WAY better results than an average person, let alone someone below average. Let me clarify that I’m not one of the ideological “blackpilled” looksmaxxing people who have been circulating lately. But I have looked into the looksmaxxing space to extract the juice and leave behind all the resentment, ideology, and noise. Why are looks important? Simply put, we evaluate people’s attractiveness almost instantly, as a biologically ingrained mechanism. We essentially have a perfect looks-rating device that we use unconsciously, though we ironically can’t give accurate ratings (people are rated 7/10 on average, which is stupid). Looks are an indicator of genetic quality and there are good survival reasons for why we value them. Doing the whole Owen Cook pickup thing is ineffective if you look bad. Even granted that it helps you get better with women (and I don’t really care to debate how much it does), it’s silly not to be optimizing the other factor that makes you have success with women— looks. Now I’ll evaluate Leo’s looks profile. This is just an honest assessment and not a personal attack. Leo is 6’2. This is a huge advantage in attractiveness, as height is a big factor in addition to facial harmony. The average male height is 5’9, so Leo towers over the average male by 5 inches. Think about this in a club environment—Leo is able to see above other people and actively heightmogs the vast majority of people. 6’2-6’3 is also often considered the ideal height, as beyond that there are diminishing returns and a degree of “freak effect.” Next, Leo is not attractive but not unattractive either facially. I’d estimate he’s probably slightly above average. But what’s interesting is how he has unknowingly looksmaxxed subtly, which is ironic given the emphasis on pickup. The biggest looksmax by far is having a low body fat percentage, which makes your facial structure more visible. Fat is bad for looks, and the ideal range is considered to be 8-12 percent body fat (depending on your specific genetics). Leo is quite lean, far more so than the average person. Additionally, Leo’s facial hair covers a likely suboptimal lower third (chin and jaw area), which is another effective looksmax. So what if Leo was 5’9, overweight, and had no facial hair? Would the results be the same? My point stands. The practical upshot of this is that improving your looks is helpful and worth doing. There is a lot of research into this subject you can do, and you have a choice how far to go, from softmaxxes (non-invasive things like hairstyle, clothing, skincare) all the way to hardmaxxes (surgeries). Obviously be safe and don’t buy into the incel ideology BS. Objections: Looksmaxxing isn’t spiritual. True, but getting laid isn’t spiritual in general; it is survival. If you’re doing survival, might as well do it effectively Why change your face? That’s so insecure/feminine/low-consciousness. Look, being attached to how your face looks is classic ego. The stigma against rhinoplasties is a part of this. If someone wants to improve their nose based on objective considerations and they are well-informed, surgery is awesome. There’s also a certain beauty to aesthetics for their own sake. By looksmaxxing, you are mainly just doing a survival activity, but since you’re focused on the actual truth of attraction, it is a microdose of spiritual embodiment— as it’s closer to truth than “coping”. Spirituality is just seeing the Truth.

Lately, when I watch a movie, I actually watch it. That means that I become the movie—I’m not an ego looking through eyes to see the screen, making my own judgments about the characters and plot. No, I’m actually being all of the characters, the plot, the themes, with no ego. The crazy thing you realize doing this practice is that Consciousness has insane variety, and it includes both the good and the bad from a human pov. Movies allow biased humans to expand their limited frames and peek into universal Consciousness. The funniest thing is that they mostly aren’t aware they’re doing this. Directors think they’re making a movie, getting actors, thinking through everything; really they’re participating in Consciousness. Most people don’t realize the insanity of movies because they don’t allow themselves to be touched by them. The ego constructs a protective barrier so that the contents of a movie will be experienced from the ego’s perspective rather than as Consciousness, which reduces the impact. This is why people are able to watch horror movies. They protect themselves—they aren’t actually watching the movie. This is the reason why children aren’t allowed to watch horror movies. They haven’t fully built up the ego, so the contents of Consciousness communicated through the film enter into their mind. Then they get nightmares and things like that. To actually watch a movie as Consciousness, it takes an exceptionally strong human. Only consciousness watches consciousness; a human does not watch consciousness. A human cannot experience being possessed by a demon inflicting terror on a victim and being the victim at the same time. It’s actually mildly traumatizing to watch a movie like this. But there are also good sides to movies (of course from the human POV because it’s relative). Many movie are more upbeat and jovial. These are more pleasant for the human, but still the human cannot take in the grandiosity of Bliss or Love. Every movie is a figment of Consciousness representing archetypes. The theme is CONSCIOUSNESS. I can only assume this would be extraordinarily amplified on psychedelics. I think this is what Leo was talking about with “integrating himself as the spider queen.” For those who don’t know, he talks about it in Reading a Poetic Description of God-Consciousness. @Leo Gura @Davino @Inliytened1

Ah, sorry. I was going off of memory. I really liked that video though. It’s one of my favorites.

This video is quite insightful

This is too cynical. Actors are God in disguise performing Maya. God doing its dance.

Does anyone have similar experiences to this? I thought I made an interesting thread, curious what you guys think.

Yes, they're more impressionable. More of what's in the movie affects them, whereas adults stay emotionally closed.

Leo is finally teaching us the squirrely alien consciousness space kangaroo spider queen crocodile 😁

Looksmaxxing doesn’t have to affect your inner game at all. Physical attraction is something that can’t be faked with game. Women care about physical appearance too, not just men, so why not improve it? This strikes me as ideology. Honestly, I doubt that Owen Cook or a lot of these people can actually consistently attract women when the cameras are off. It’s physically almost impossible for a woman to be attracted to Owen Cook.

A lot of y’all are massive cope artists

You can always do both. Aside from that, are you aware of the halo effect? People treat you better if you look better, even in non-romantic settings. This alone is a reason to investigate looksmaxxing. I’m actually most interested in this from a pure philosophy perspective. How is it that looks are so important, yet society has a taboo on talking about them? Somehow we don’t want to face the underlying forces affecting interactions; we just want to act unconsciously. How is it that people rate themselves a 7 on average? That’s an amazing lesson in self-bias right there! I think much of the mainstream reaction against looksmaxxing is because it’s so outside of our paradigm of how attraction works that it shatters our worldview and we feel like we have to reject it. “What, you think looks matter more than personality? You’re such an awful person.” This is how collective ego protects itself. The looks/blackpill thing is a fascinating aspect of our survival as humans. I see it as a hard truth that you learn anyway, because you love truth.

And many more things too. A rhinoplasty is quite safe and effective, provided you know what you’re doing and it actually improves your face. A genioplasty is also perfectly reasonable for a recessed chin. Wearing contacts instead of glasses improves looks in the vast majority of cases—and colored contacts can improve coloring. Going to the gym and keeping a low body fat drastically improves your physical appeal. I could go on. I think if you’re in the dating/pickup scene seriously, you should be doing some looksmaxxes.

Clav is actually a complicated case because he did a huge variety of looksmaxxing procedures throughout puberty (all of which is documented on looksmax.org) and definitely changed his appearance as a result. For example, he injected testosterone from age 14, which changes facial structure to make it more masculine. This only works during puberty. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Clav would have looked above average regardless. But the hypothesis that he didn't significantly improve his looks is very unlikely. I don't think it's purely performative. He genuinely believes in the whole looksmaxxing ideology. How would you rate the percentage of looks vs game roughly? And if it turns out you actually can improve your looks significantly, wouldn't it be worth doing? @Leo Gura

It's objective in exactly the way I said it is. Of course, everything is Absolute Beauty in a sense, but this is not what we're talking about. You have to separate uses of terms for different contexts. There is actual science behind this and I already gave you an introduction which you can research further if you so desire. If you want to be closeminded, go ahead. You are approaching this from a perspective of "I am the more conscious/intelligent one; it is on my opponent to provide the evidence or else I was right." Hope this doesn't trickle over into spirituality lol.

I get the sense that you’re being close-minded and not approaching this in good faith. But I’ll assume the best. First, I already explained why looksmaxxing is new. As for the validity, my claim is basically that attractiveness is objective and can be improved. Here is a video showing how these measurements are objective: This video dives into the eye area using science: How I understand it? The first thing to do is really learning about what makes for an attractive face and body. Then you can make changes accordingly. How do I know that the ideal standard is accurate? From cross-referencing various sources, combined with my own direct experience of what looks good. The science is really just making explicit what we already know subconsciously through our biological programming. And we all have an aesthetic eye. Once you have some knowledge, you can analyze your face and then decide what changes to make. You may decide to make none at all, which is fine. Here’s an example of what this looks like (male perspective). You may find out you lack facial angularity, which contributes to perceived masculinity and attractiveness. A solution to this is getting lean—most people underestimate how lean is ideal and don’t realize their face would be improved from leaning out even if they aren’t conventionally speaking overweight. Getting lean reveals your facial structure. Let’s say you get lean and see some improvement, but it’s still not great. In that case there’s not much you can do, but an easy softmax is growing a beard, which will cover up the lack of angularity in the lower third. Of course, this is still inferior to having good angularity, which is basically just genetic. This is just one example of a possible looksmax, and you would just keep applying this to yourself to whatever extent you want to.

I'm not sure what you mean by "your" data. That's not what data is by definition. Yes it is. It was citing actual studies. This honestly makes me doubt your intelligence. If you actually read the response carefully, you would see that it's an adaptation of research that mostly started in the 70s and became more solidified by the 2000s and 2010s. I'm not. Why are you lacking in openmindedness and critical thinking on this topic? Look, I'm just trying to fill a gap on this subforum. If you're interested, why not research yourself rather than asking me to provide the studies or my thought process so that you can correct it (while assuming you're right from the get-go)? If you don't want to, that's fine too.